Battles in the Desert (40th Anniversary Edition)

This landmark novella, one of the central texts of twentieth-century Mexican literature, published originally forty years ago, is eerily apropos to our current dark times--a child's-eye-view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in "the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods." A middle-class boy grows up a in a world of children aping adults (gang wars at recess (Arabs vs the Jews), racism, strife), where a child's left to ponder "how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness." When he laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of racism and a vicious class system, his older brother answers: "So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Aleman's regime," with "the face of El Senor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse." Sound familiar? Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love he cherishes for the young mother of a friend--and his inability to actually share his love (and her mysterious disappearance) has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader's skin. A remarkable and indelible novella about innocence betrayed which packs a whole world into its several dozen pages. Acclaimed translator Katherine Silver returned and greatly revised her translation, one of the very first she published as a young translator, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.